In case you were still doubting whether or not Apple's lawsuits against Samsung were a case of 'if you can't compete, litigate', Samsung's financial results should seal the deal. The company shipped round and about 50 million smartphones, twice as many smartphones as Apple shipped. So, not only is Android doing better on smartphones than iOS, there's now also a single manufacturer outselling Apple. Oh, the next avenue for de-emphasizing this achievement has already reared its head: Samsung has a wider portfolio, and as such, the comparison isn't fair. Nonsense, of course - Volkswagen sells lots more models than, say, Mazda, but that doesn't mean you can't compare them. Maybe, just maybe, having a wide portfolio of devices to meet the various different needs of the market is simply a very good strategy. It'll be interesting to see just how much Apple can take back with the next iPhone, especially since the full potential of the Galaxy SIII hasn't been realised yet and will be accounted for in Samsung's next quarter as well. Fun, such a fight between titans. Just too bad one of the two titans plays dirty by opting for the courtroom.

Well, here you see how patents work. If someone attacks you with there patents you can only defend using your patents by attacking yourself. That is offensive vs defensive as Thom wrote and there is indeed a HUGE difference.

It is Apple attacking there and there are no question about that. They where the ones that tried and still try to fight compitors competing on the market against there products using there patents. They started the patent war. That Samsung defends themself using the same tactick is just the consequence.

Now there are 2 options left:
1. Escalade the war. That is what happens.
2. Come to and end and compete again. That is in Samsungs best interest cause, as we see, they are winning on the market. But its not in Apples best interest.

Sooner or later 2 will happen cause 1 reached its peak and from there, once everybody used all there weapons, its done and things can move on.

By the way a discussion of the full implications of Samsung's total dominance of the Android market would interesting. Presumably when Google came up with their Android strategy they thought they would be the dog wagging the OEM's tail. Now it appears they are the tail being wagged because only Samsung has made a successful business out of Android which gives them potentially very big leverage over Google and Android.

Projecting a couple of years down the road when most of the non-profitable OEMs have exited the market or when Samsung's device sales simply dwarf all other Android OEM you can see an interesting situation looming.

Given that Samsung seems to be able to make a very large and profitable business using old versions of the Android OS what's to stop them saying at some point that the latest version of the Android OS is good enough and it's time to dump Google for say Baidu in China, or Bing in the US. Or ask Google to pay them high fees to carry it's services such as search.

Irrespective of how successful Samsung is I think that Google never planned for a scenario where only one OEM ran the Android phone market and they must be at least somewhat concerned about their apparent vulnerability.

No. Android is not a copy of iOS, there is not one line of code in common.

Apple is trying to destroy Android, and also eliminate all serious competition.

It is attempting to do so by arguing that Motorola or Samsung should get only $0.0049 (half a cent) per device for essential, expensive R&D hardware patents that make up the actual working core of a mobile phone (and then not paying out even that much), yet Apple should get from Motorola and Samsung $24 per device for a rectangular-box-with-rounded-corners cosmetic "design" which it stole from Sony anyway.